[Wikimedia-l] Has the underlying level of edits risen or fallen since the Edit Filters came in in 2009?

[WereSpielChequers]

Thanks Nemo,

Just because the edit filter is enabled by default doesn't mean that every
wiki has people optimising it to find vandalism in their language.

I'm trying to work out what the underlying "real" level of editing has been
since 2009.  The problem with measuring either unreverted edits or edits by
active users is that the edit filters don't just lose us a large proportion
of the vandalism that we used to get, they also lose us a lot of goodfaith
edits that have ceased to be necessary, including the vandalism reversions,
 warnings and block messages that have been automated away by the edit
filter.

The stats at http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/PlotsPngEditHistoryAll.htm get
round part of that by only measuring mainspace edits, so they don't count
the warnings and block messages that we've lost. Though they presumably
have lost the reversion of vandalism that has now been prevented by the
edit filter. But measuring article space edits has its own problems - the
more article creation has shifted to sandboxes in userspace  and especially
to on EN wiki to  WP space as part of Articles for creation,
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Articles_for_creation>
the
less meaningful it is to measure the different spaces as if their
boundaries were immutable.

I appreciate that some of these things are difficult to measure, but
sometimes it is the difficult  stuff that is important. A case in point
being the increasing  tendency to revert unsourced edits on EN Wiki. The
stats you quote treat all reversions the same, so the rise in simply
reverting unsourced edits would appear to be more than masked by a
combination of  the loss of vandalism reversions to the edit filter, and
the inreasing speed and sophistication of the vandalfighting bots.

Regards

Jonathan



On 28 August 2013 13:49, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki at gmail.com> wrote:

> The question can't really be answered without knowing what you want to
> achieve; I'll start from the end.
>
> WereSpielChequers, 28/08/2013 14:13:
>
>  This is of more than academic interest, if we simply ignore this effect
>> and
>> make decisions based on the remaining raw edits after the edit filter,
>> then
>> the more efficient the edit filter gets at preventing vandalism the more
>> we
>> would be beating ourselves up for losing edits.
>>
>
> Usually we consider the number of active users, which is less affected by
> this. Editing activity should be measured using
> http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/**PlotsPngEditHistoryAll.htm<http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/PlotsPngEditHistoryAll.htm>which allows to check for unreverted edits (just updated by Erik after a
> few years it had been dormant).
>
> If your aim is measuring the impact AbuseFilter in reducing patrolling
> efforts, then it's another matter. I've requested some reports in
> https://bugzilla.wikimedia.**org/show_bug.cgi?id=42359<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42359>: there are already some DB queries but we lack a visualisation.
> You can also use https://meta.wikimedia.org/**wiki/Abuse_filter<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abuse_filter>to find what wikis used (or not) the abuse filter and how, before it was
> enabled by default on all wikis.
>
> Nemo
>